>>I can switch to the kernel, kill it, go back to the front end,
>>and execute any command. This automatically starts a clean kernel,
>>and I'm back in action in less than 60 seconds.
>You can avoid restarting the kernel by using Todd Gayley's excellent
>CleanSlate.m package, described in The Mathematica Journal 3.3 (Summer
>1993) and available on MathSource.
I have found CleanSlate (a wonderful idea) to be ineffective in dealing with
large packages. I spend most of my time with a megabyte of packages and several
hundred additional names in the kernel. CleanSlate was unable to remove them in
a reasonable length of time; I never observed it to terminate.
Richard Mercer